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Some Kind Of Trouble Bio (2010)
James Blunt - BBC Radio Theatre, Dec 7th 2010
Photo by K E Southall ©
“I’ve been on a bit of a roller coaster,” says James Blunt, in his typically dry, British understatement. Two albums, two world tours and 18 million records sold later, Blunt has taken a journey that few ever experience. Now, with his compelling new Custard/Atlantic album “Some Kind of Trouble”, he’s back home.
The album is delightfully upbeat and uncynical. “It captures a bit of the mood of the early ‘80s. There was a global atmosphere in the West that we could do anything – the same optimism we felt as teenagers,” says Blunt,. ‘Some Kind of Trouble’ really captures that same sense of freedom and excitement and naivety.”
Blunt’s first album, “Back to Bedlam,” catapulted him into worldwide superstardom on the strength of such massive songs as “You’re Beautiful,” “High” and “Goodbye My Lover.” His second album, 2007’s “All the Lost Souls,” debuted at No. 1 in 10 countries, selling nearly 5 million copies globally and featuring such hits as “1973,” ”Same Mistake” and “Carry You Home.” He has received numerous awards and accolades including two Brit Awards, two World Music Awards, two MTV Video Music Awards, an MTV European Music Award and five Grammy nomination.
Blunt now sees the first two albums as a pair of book ends –action and reaction. “Some Kind of Trouble” starts a new chapter. “The second album was quite introverted. It was about perception. But these new songs are not about fame and celebrity – they’re about reality,” Blunt says. “I’ve been hanging out with my friends, writing songs about the world we live in, and where we want to go.”
Produced mainly by Steve Robson, key tracks include the bittersweet “These are the Words,” the trenchant, pointed “Superstar” and the infectious “Stay the Night,” a sexy, acoustic-guitar driven, party song about “singing ‘Billie Jean’ and mixing vodka and caffeine.” Written by Blunt, Robson, and OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder, the song also shouts-out to the legendary Bob Marley, referencing the reggae master’s “Is This Love.” In addition to collecting his first (and likely last) co-write with Marley, “Stay the Night” marks the first time Blunt has written with two other songwriters in the same room or started songs from scratch.
Indeed, a sense of freshness and spontaneity pervades “Some Kind of Trouble,” which Blunt recorded largely in London. “Previously, I would write a song and we’d go and record it later. This time, it was very much come in with nothing,” Blunt recalls. “There was a sense of energy and excitement, to just have fun in the studio and make a noise. We did that and felt natural.” In addition to Robson, with whom he wrote the majority of the album, Blunt also wrote with The Bird & the Bee’s Greg Kurstin, Better Than Ezra’s Kevin Griffin, Wayne Hector and “All the Lost Souls” collaborator Eg White, with whom he wrote the brash “Turn Me On,” which will probably dispel the idea of Blunt as “Mr. Sensitive”. “People expect me to be quite a serious person, who takes life and myself seriously, and that’s not really the case,” he says. “Maybe they’ll see another side in this album?”
That doesn’t mean the “Some Kind of Trouble” is scared to tackle some heavy topics. The album’s anchor is “No Tears,” an unsentimental ballad about “the summing up of a life,” Blunt says. “There are certain songs along the way that are milestones - that define a writer to themselves. Goodbye My Lover was that song on the first album. Same Mistake was from the second. No Tears is my milestone on this album.”
In this tabloid-driven age of overexposure, Blunt fervently wants the music to have the first and final word. “I have a Twitter account which my label and management want me to do and I can’t engage with it in a way they want me to,” he admits. “They want me to say ‘I’m eating this for breakfast’ and I’m upset about this in the world today.’ The world wants public figures to over-share and I don’t feel comfortable doing it, so I kind of enjoy the way the songs try to speak for themselves.”
It’s not that he’s not concerned about world events, it’s more that in this self-absorbed world, he is an artist who realizes the world does not revolve around him. “With so much attention, it’s easy for musicians to think too much of themselves and their position in the world,” he says. “We’re not worthy of that kind of self consideration.” In fact, Blunt feels the best use of celebrity is to use it to shine the spotlight with those doing good. As he had done on previous concert treks, on his 2008-2009 globe-spanning tour Blunt raised funds for Doctors Without Borders, the international medical humanitarian organization whose work the Sandhurst graduate witnessed first hand as a British military officer stationed in Kosovo. He also works closely with Friends of the Earth to increase awareness of climate change.
Indeed, as much as he loves making new music, for Blunt, the ultimate joy comes from playing the songs live and sharing them with an audience. And with a new tour starting in 2011, he’s looking forward to getting back out there. As the recording process comes to a close, he’s waiting to climb back on the bus. “Put the album out and get me on tour,” he says. “We’re going to have the time of our lives playing these songs.”
T he Way James Blunt sees it, we may get older, but nothing changes much from elementary school. "We seem to be in exactly the same state as when I was 8 years old. In a school playground, children gossiped about who kissed who, who said what about who, who isn't cool because they weren't wearing the right clothes. Now on a global scale, people write about who kissed who, who said what, and who's wearing what clothes."
In the nearly three years since Blunt released Back to Bedlam, he's sold 11 million CD's worldwide with the album going No. 1 in 18 countries and top 10 in 35. A short list of accomplishments includes being nominated for five Grammys, landing the first No. 1 single in the U.S. ("You're Beautiful") by a British act since Elton John's "Candle in the Wind" in 1997 and winning two MTV Awards and two Brit Awards.
That seemingly sudden rush to global superstardom and the attendant experiences make up the lyrics content on All The Lost Souls, out Sept. 18th on Custard / Atlantic Records. The 10-song cycle about life - and death - shows tremendous growth from 2005's Back to Bedlam, which Blunt calls "a very honest, slightly naive collection of thoughts, emotions and experiences. I wrote them without knowledge that anyone would hear them."
This time he knows there's an audience eager to hear his songs about "the ups and downs of his journey." Blunt bristles at the notion that his now-lofty perch distances him from his listeners. "Just because I've been given the fickle title of celebrity, it doesn't mean I'm any less human. I go through the same thing, only my mother hears about it first now," he says, laughingly referencing his frequent appearances in the tabloids.
Indeed, one listen to All The Lost Souls and its clear Blunt is talking about what unites us, not what divides us. We all crave love, comfort and security, especially in those times when they seem the hardest to find. Those intersections are the ones that interest Blunt the most and on "All The Lost Souls" he brings a focus, clarity and, at times, urgency to our travels.
"We go through this really amazing experience called life and we're trying to understand it and understand why the hell we're here," he says. "I really love life. I really enjoy it, but it does trouble me and as it goes and it ticks by - it's not very long - you kind of wonder what you're going to get out of it, where to look for greater depth and meaning, and why we do the things we do to fill it. I think we all experience that."
All The Lost Souls was found as he toured the world in support of Back to Bedlam. He wrote five songs while on the road, testing them before a very willing audience. When it came to write the remaining songs, Blunt needed to get off the merry-go-round of the last few years and be still. After the constant cacophony, the silence took some getting used to. "It was the first minute to stop and look around at what had really happened after three years and have a think about it," he says.
He returned again to Ibiza the following winter and received songwriting assistance from a most unlikely source: "Someone had stolen my boiler, so there was no heating," he says. "I was in the house wearing an overcoat, a hat and fingerless gloves playing on the piano. The builder would drop in and say I was living like a monk. The songs I'd written in the summer having just stepped out of a club were much happier."
Seeking some different flavours for the album, Blunt asked his publisher to pair him with "people who weren't necessarily the obvious writers... to just free myself." While Blunt wrote the bulk of the album himself, his request led to collaborations with Mark Batson (Dr. Dre, Dave Matthews Band), Jimmy Hogarth (with whom he also wrote for "Bedlam"), Steve McEwan, Eg (cq) White and Max Martin.
Musically, the album draws much of its inspiration from great artists of the '70s: "Fleetwood Mac, Don McLean, Elton John, maybe a touch of Steely Dan in there, and if I'm lucky, a bit of Bowie, "he says, before cheekily adding,"and if I'm lying I might as well add Zeppelin as well."
The album opens with the layered, rollicking "1973," a nostalgic look back at sharing great times with friends. Songs such as "One of the Brightest Stars" and "Annie" deal with the vagaries and distortions that fame can bring. "Carry You Home" and "I'll Take Everything" tackle our fragile mortality, while "I Really Want You" and "Same Mistake" showcase Blunt as his most vulnerable.
The Sandhurst graduate who served in Kosovo admits that he finds language limiting, but, in a song, he finds the freedom to write what he can't speak. "My music is autobiographical. It's my expression and it's for me," he says. "It's a necessary expression; otherwise I'd just be this Brit that has a shell." And as for those who may find his confessions too dramatic, he quotes Jeff Buckley: "Sensitivity isn't being wimpy; it's about being so painfully aware that a flea landing on a dog is like a sonic boom."
When it came time to record in Los Angeles with Back to Bedlam producer Tom Rothock, he brought in the boys from the road. The recording marked a sharp contrast to "Bedlam," which was tracked with studio musicians and then with Blunt overdubbing many of the instruments himself. This time, "I sat behind a piano or a guitar and played the band the songs and described what I wanted from them," he says. "We'd been touring together for two-and-a-half years. They know exactly what it is I'm after and it takes very little time for them to put the flesh on a skeleton."
With the recording behind him, Blunt is eager to get back before his fans. "Touring is the most fun you can possibly have," he says. "It's the best invention anyone ever came up with." Yet even he imagines a day-hopefully in the far, far future-when audiences are no longer there. On the album's closer, "I Can't Hear the Music," he sings with a quiet resolve that even after the fans' applause has faded and the curtain has come down for the last time, the music remains. For Blunt, it's a song of hope and an ultimate reminder of why he's here. "The chorus sums it up: "And if I can't hear the music and the audience is gone/I'll dance here on my own." It's about saying I'm in it for the passion," he says. "I'm in it for the love of it and the audience may be a temporary thing."
Some ageing rockstar once said that what he feared most, in a musical sense, was the songwriting well running dry. That's something that's unlikely ever to worry James Blunt. He has, it can be said without exaggeration, lived a life that should provide enough material for a dozen albums, with sufficient left over for a couple of screenplays. Sure - that's what all the singer-songwriters say. But this is a definitively different singer-songwriter.
Take "No Bravery", the song that closes his debut album, "Back to Bedlam", for instance: It was written in Kosovo in 1999, while James was a reconnaissance officer in the British army. On patrol around Pristina, he kept his guitar bolted to the outside of his tank. But in quieter moments, it came out, as he wrote about life as a 22-year-old peacekeeper in the aftermath of one of the decade's bloodiest civil wars. The rest of his unit ordered him to keep the noise down as he wrote and sang in the post-midnight stillness. He didn't keep the noise down. "'No Bravery' is the only complete song I wrote in Kosovo. I wrote it lying by my tank in my sleeping bag with my boots on. You had to sleep with your boots on. The song is pretty fatalistic. The rest of the album is fatalistic," he says wryly.
But his Kosovan experience is only one aspect of a new artist who's destined to find his way into a lot of record collections. Essentially, James is a find - an old soul who's somehow unafflicted by cynicism, a young writer who sounds likes he's been doing this for years, an angelic voice who's had a hell of a ride. Elton John, with whom he shares a manager, thinks "You're Beautiful" is a modern successor to John's own "Your Song". An astute comparison, because much of "Back to Bedlam" is reminiscent of John's early-career best. Meanwhile, Tom Rothrock, who produced the album, sees James as a potential British answer to a couple of other clients, Beck and Elliott Smith. Rothrock had never heard of James until he stumbled across a live track he performed at last year's South by Southwest, upon which the producer was so smitten that he instantly agreed to work on "Back to Bedlam".
What's odd is that a military family like the Blunts - his father, a career Colonel, has only recently left the army - should spawn a James. As he tells it, his upbringing was the traditional sort that scarcely seems to exist anymore: born in an army hospital in Hampshire, he was sent to boarding school at seven, excelled at science and maths, got a pilot's license at 16 ("I can fly anything with a single engine – Tiger Moths, Spitfires"), did a spell at Bristol University, and then, "because my dad was pushing for it", joined the army. He eventually made Captain, and was the first British officer into Pristina, leading a column of 30,000 peacekeeping troops.
Music, though, has always been his mainstay. Actually, this needs to be qualified. James got into music lateishly, the result of growing up in a musicless house that didn't possess a CD player. "My dad was really practical, and saw music as just noise. The only CD player was in the car, and we had just three CDs - 'American Pie', and a couple of Beach Boys ones." When he went away to school, though, he learned piano, then appeared in a school musical, and that was it. From then on, he listened and learned as much as he could. A love of Queen and Dire Straits came and quickly went. Picking up a friend's guitar at 14, he played along to Nirvana's "Nevermind", and wrote his first song soon after. In so doing, he made himself unpopular with the school housemaster, who knew that music drifting down the corridor late at night could invariably be traced to Blunt's room. His teen years were a battle between teachers, who were intent on imposing some sort of education, and himself, equally intent on making music his career.
Armed with "some dodgy demos" he'd recorded, he left the army in 2002 to become a full-time musician ("My dad was nervous, because I was leaving a steady job"). Said dodgy items were an impressive enough showcase of his haunting voice and exquisitely personal songs to land him both management and publishing deals within months. "And then I met Linda Perry [songwriter-producer for, among others, Pink and Christina Aguilera], cos my publishers gave her some songs, and then I went to play South by Southwest, and then she gave me a deal with her own label, Custard Records," James says, still half-dazzled by it all.
He went to California in September, 2003, to record his album, and discovered that being a slightly scruffy English boy in Los Angeles could be very pleasant. Staying at the home of an actress, he spent his days recording with Rothrock, and his nights...well...researching LA's club scene. "With my naïve background, it was like stepping into a devil's cauldron," he says, in happy reminiscence. He recorded the painfully poignant track "Goodbye, My Lover" in the actresses’ bathroom, where she kept an old piano.
His current favourite listening is Cat Power and Lou Reed's "Transformer" album, and "Back to Bedlam" has a similarly enigmatic quality. He won't explain what most of the songs are about, though he does admit that the deceptively bubbly "So Long, Jimmy" was inspired by Messrs Hendrix and Morrison. As for the rest, he says only, "You can get away with murder in a song".
James Blunt’s family have served in one kind of army or another since 995A.D. A long line of warriors. Savages really. Not a musical bone in any one of their bodies. The only music he heard growing up was “Happy Birthday” and “Silent Night”. His father considered all music, even classical, to be unnecessary noise. Although James was not one to rock the family boat, he didn’t really think he was going to join the army – it sort of crept up on him. Plus his family didn’t have a boat. Aged fourteen he just held the teenage conviction that he would have an interesting life – maybe that’s why he picked the guitar? Then again, maybe if he hadn’t, he would have tripped over it. He went to University and studied Aerospace Manufacturing Engineering and Sociology, spending most lectures asleep on the floor at the back. In much the same way, he ended up in the army. In essence, one day he was sleeping off a hangover at the back of a sociology lecture hall and the next thing he knew he was in Kosovo with a gun and a guitar strapped to the side of a tank, wondering who he could possibly sleep with to get out of this war. To break up the super attenuated monotony, James would sometimes stroll through Serb villages wearing an East German cap singing, “All we are saying is give peace a chance”. “We were peace-keepers at that point,” he explained, shrugging helplessly.
So how did the music get into him, you might ask? Well if you were sent to boarding school aged seven, studied Engineering by mistake (“I thought we were going to fly planes, but we just pulled metals apart – the brochure was very misleading.”), joined the army by default, guarded The Queen, buried The Queen Mother and pranced around London like a tit for Japanese tourists to photograph, what you’re going to want to do very much after that, besides getting stoned and laid, is put your gun down, pick up a guitar and make an album in America with Linda Perry. So James came to Los Angeles in September 2003 to record with Tom Rothrock et al. At night he’d go to bars, bringing with him his valuable British accent (in the U.K., too posh for some people – in LA, the best thing she’d heard all night) and the fact that like 50 Cent he’d been shot at numerous times, but unlike the Cent, had dodged the bullets. One song, “Goodbye My Lover”, was recorded in his landladies’ bathroom (“She was a frequenter of mental hospitals and in general, a freak – but pleasant”) where, naturally, she kept a piano.
From birth in a military hospital in Tidworth, to Harrow School, to Aerospace Manufacturing Engineering, to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, to The Household Cavalry, to Kosovo, to Buckingham Palace, to a recording studio in Los Angeles. How did James get from there to here? Only James Blunt’s hairdresser knows for certain, and either he isn’t talking or James cuts his own hair, and it’s up to you to join the dots – there are ten of them on the album.
Written by 'The Landlady'
At the age of sixteen. a young man with dreams learns to fly, then trains as an army officer and sees war and peace in Kosovo. He becomes a proficient horseman and is assigned to protect the Queen of England. Then he gives it all up to make music... James Blunt was sent to boarding school at the age of seven. His father was in the army, and his parents lived abroad most of the time. This life seemed quite normal to James because he was at school with other children from military families. He would visit his parents in the holidays, and stay with various friends and relatives at weekends. He feels that this life made him "relatively independent at a fairly young age." At University, James thought he was going to "fly and build aeroplanes", but soon found his chosen degree course of Aerospace Manufacturing Engineering was not what he was expecting, so he made the switch to socialogy, and learned to fly in his spare time. He achieved his pilots lincence at the age of sixteen, and after university joined the army. Within a year he was an officer with the Life Guards, then in reconnaissance in charge of small tanks and fifteen soldiers. He worked in Canada on nuclear test sites where for six months he played the part of a Russian in a 'war' that resembled a massive paintball extravaganza. Active service followed in Kosovo, where James went in as a and remained as a peacekeeper. Music had played a large part in James Blunts life since a friend at school taught him to play the guitar. He also studied piano and had been writing songs and playing in local groups, performing at village halls being paid in beer. James arrived in Kosovo with his guitar strapped to the side of his tank, and regulary played and sang for his fellow soldiers and for the local people. In Kosovo, he found rather more to write about than the lost loves of his teens, and one song in particular, "No Bravery", evokes his experiences there. Returning to England, James undertook extensive training in horsemanship, and joined the Queen's Mounted Guard. Wearing the silver armour and the white plumed helmet, he protected the Queen on public events during the Golden Jubilee and spent two days on duty at the vigil for the lying in state of the Queen Mother. In October 2001, James finally succumbed to the lure of his dreams, and quit the army to make a living at being a musician. Not surprisingly this decision shocked his family, though they had tried to be understanding. As he says "I've been in institutions throughout my entire life. Now I can do that through my music. A song like "Wise Men", for example, is about not conforming, about breaking away from everyday rules." So what is his music like? James Blunt is an English singer/songwriter with a thrilling, edgy voice. If you were buying a James Blunt album on Amazon.com and checked out "Customers who brought this item also brought..." listing, you might find Coldplay or David Gray there, and if there had been some really discerning listeners shopping on the internet, they may have included Leo Sayer's angst-ridden, raw, debut album, Silverbird, or early Cat Stevens albums, or even Neil Young. Or of course they might not have brought anything else because, James Blunt is James Blunt and he is unique.